The Quiet Storm

Elizabeth sighed and settled against him. The kiss was soft and sweet. His skin was warm and smelled of his cologne, and she inhaled it deeply into her lungs while her mouth caressed his.

Under other circumstances she would rather have her derriere tattooed with a snake than be caught in the middle of an embrace like this where any stranger might see them.

But how could she step away when she had thought about being in his arms like this, secretly yearned for it, for so many months now? When she had imagined this kiss so many times—and was discovering that the reality of it far, far exceeded any fantasy?

She would have to go back to her dull, insular existence soon enough. For now, she wanted to savor every second.

The Quiet Storm

RaeAnne Thayne

RAEANNE THAYNE

lives in a graceful old Victorian nestled in the rugged mountains of Northern Utah, along with her husband and two young children. Her books have won numerous honors, including a RITA® Award nomination by the Romance Writers of America. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers. She can be reached through her Web site at www.raeannethayne.com or at P.O. Box 6682, North Logan, UT 84341.

To speech therapists everywhere.

Special thanks to Robert Hale, editor of the Waggoner Cruising Guide, for his invaluable help to this dedicated landlubber about all things nautical.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 1

The ice princess was nervous.

From his post by the door of the precinct break room, Beau Riley watched the woman perched on a plastic molded chair in front of his desk. She sat prim as a schoolgirl, with spine-cracking posture—knees perfectly aligned, shoulders back, those huge blue eyes focused neither to the right nor the left.

He might have thought she was carved from a thin glacial sheer except for her hands, which trembled ever so slightly.

No. Scratch that, he corrected himself, looking a little closer. She was more than nervous. She was scared to death. Elizabeth Quinn, multigazillionaire publishing heiress, looked ready to jump right out of her skin.

He had to admit he wanted to let her stew in it a little longer, let her sit there until perspiration popped out on that lush, perfect lip, until she was as jumpy as a grasshopper on a hot sidewalk.

The vindictiveness of the impulse startled him. Was his ego really so fragile?

Maybe. He had plenty of reason to dislike this particular rich bitch.

Still, curiosity was a far stronger element of his psyche than petty vengeance. He had to find out. What the hell was she doing perched at the desk of one of Seattle PD’s finest? What would possibly make the ice princess come down from her crystal palace to mingle with the rest of the world?

Whatever she was doing here, he wouldn’t find out unless he talked to her. With one hand fisted around the handle of his favorite Sonics coffee mug, he sauntered to his desk and loomed over her.

As he neared, she drew a deep breath as if gearing up for a firing squad, then she lifted her gaze to his. He wanted to think he saw an instant of shocked recognition in those cool-blue eyes, then she shielded whatever emotion might be lurking there.

“May I help you?” he asked, his voice sharp as an ice pick.

She blinked a little at his tone, and those pretty white hands fluttered just once then tightened on the strap of a slim little nothing of a purse he was willing to bet cost more than his month’s salary.

“Are you…” Her voice faltered and she closed her eyes. After a few seconds she opened them again. He was intrigued to see that the nervousness had given way to determination. “Are you Detective Riley?”

So it wasn’t a mistake. She was here looking for him. He narrowed his eyes as his curiosity kicked up a notch. Last time he’d seen her, she hadn’t been nearly as eager to talk to him.

“Yeah. I’m Riley. Who wants to know?” He couldn’t resist asking the question, even though he knew exactly who she was.

Muscles worked in her throat as she swallowed. “My name is Elizabeth Quinn. I’m a…friend of Grace Dugan’s. She gave me your name and said you might be able to help me.”

Ah. Suddenly things began to make more sense. He should have known Gracie had her meddling little fingerprints all over this somehow. His temporarily sidelined partner damn well ought to have enough on her plate with a husband like Jack Dugan, a new baby, an energetic seven-year-old and that big house out on Bainbridge Island.

But Gracie wasn’t content with that. Oh, no. She wasn’t happy unless she was coming up with new and creative ways to tangle up his life.

He swallowed a frustrated growl and turned his attention back to the latest complication perched in front of him. Damn. Why did it have to be Elizabeth Quinn? She probably needed a traffic ticket fixed or some other piddling thing.

He wanted to order her away from his desk. Wanted to snarl that he had real police business waiting for him and didn’t have time for this today. Before he could open his mouth, though, he caught sight of her hands again. Those long, slender fingers looked strangely vulnerable clasping that ridiculous bag. Closer inspection showed that instead of the glossy polish he might have expected, the nails were bare and looked as if they’d been chewed almost to the quick.

The sight shouldn’t have moved him. He was a hardened police detective who had seen the worst life had to offer. Still, a funny little twinge caught in his chest.

“How can I help you?” he finally asked.

Elizabeth Quinn pursed those lush lips, so at odds with the rest of her prissy, back-off demeanor. She followed his gaze to her hands, then looked back at him, and the sudden pain etched into her eyes like acid on glass took him by surprise.

It had been there all the time, he realized, just buried beneath all the nervousness.

“I need you to find a murderer,” she whispered.

Okay. He wasn’t expecting that one. He edged back in his chair and frowned. “We have a chain of command for these kinds of things, Ms. Quinn. If you’re here to report a crime, I can point you in the right direction. Other than that, I’m not sure how I can help you.”

Her chin lifted. “I’ve been through just about every link in that chain of command, Mr. Riley. I’m ready to hire private investigators, but Grace suggested I come to you first.”

Lucky him. He made a mental note to wring Gracie’s pretty little neck the next time he saw her, and blew out a breath. “What is it you expect me to do?”

She had an odd habit of pausing before she spoke, as if weighing the wisdom of every word. Beau caught himself leaning forward so he didn’t miss anything.

“I’m here to ask you to reopen a case that has been closed.”

“We don’t close murder cases until a suspect is convicted.”

“This case was closed because the death was ruled a suicide. But it’s not. I know it wasn’t. You people have it wrong, no matter how damning the evidence might seem. Tina never would have killed herself. Never. She might have been depressed and…and in trouble but she would never have done anything that drastic.”

Whoa. Where did all this intensity come from? The ice princess had suddenly vanished, leaving behind a passionate woman with snapping blue eyes and flaming color.

He wouldn’t have expected that such emotion lurked inside the brittle shell of Elizabeth Quinn. He had to wonder what other heat might be hidden there.

“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to give me a little more than a first name to go on here. Tina who?”

It was fascinating to watch her control click back into place. One minute she radiated fire, the next she sat before him composed and cool. She waited just a heartbeat more, then she spoke softly. “Tina Hidalgo. My friend. Three weeks ago she was found dead in her apartment. Shot.”

Her mouth with its elegant pink tint gave a tiny quiver and straightened again. “There was no sign of forced entry, no fingerprints but her own on the gun, and she left a note.”

“Sounds pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Yes, that’s what the other detectives—Speth and Walker—concluded. But they’re wrong.”

He had seen this reaction before. Suicides were often the toughest cases a cop had to work. In their grief and denial, the people left behind often struggled to face the fact that their loved one would ever take such a final step. They often preferred to focus their anger not on the deceased but on the cops with the nerve to put such a stark label on their loss.

He didn’t want to add to her grief, but it would be cruel to give her any hope that he could help her. “Ms. Quinn, I’m sorry about your friend. But Marc Walker and Dennis Speth are both fine detectives. They wouldn’t have closed the case unless they had ruled out any possibility of homicide and unless the medical examiner signed off on their findings. I’m not sure what you would like me to do.”

“Grace seemed to think you might consider taking another look at the facts in the case.”

No fair dragging Gracie into it again. He was definitely going to have to have a talk with her.

“Are you party to any facts in the case that Detectives Speth and Watson don’t know?”

She was quiet for several beats. “I don’t think so. But I’m not sure they gave proper…proper consideration to some of those facts.”

“Such as?”

Again that little pause, then she drew a deep breath. “Tina has a son. A beautiful little boy, Alex. For reasons I won’t go into, he lives with…with his grandmother and with me, but Tina loves him.”

Raw grief swam in her eyes for just a moment, then she composed herself. “She loved him,” she corrected. “Tina was a good mother who loved her son. She never would have left him like that. I know she wouldn’t. She was trying to get her life straightened out so Alex could live with her again. We just talked about it the evening before she…before she died.”

“Ms. Quinn—”

“Please. Will you at least look at the facts of the case and see if you can find anything the other detectives might have missed? Grace said she would do it herself if she could access the files.”

Beau ground his back teeth. If he didn’t agree to help Miss Priss, he could just picture Grace storming the precinct to comb through the report herself, dragging her newborn and her stepdaughter, Emma, along with her. Gracie wouldn’t let the fact that she was supposed to be on extended maternity leave for at least another six months stop her.

Whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to help Elizabeth Quinn. Damn. For anyone else in the world, he wouldn’t mind agreeing to take a look at the file—what could it hurt?—but it stuck in his craw like a bad piece of haddock that he had to humor someone like her.

He pictured her the last time he’d seen her, at the event Grace had conned him into attending by using a potent combination of guilt and blackmail.

Society benefits weren’t his thing. He would never have agreed to go to that one if it hadn’t been a fund-raiser for Grace’s pet project, an after-school program for troubled inner-city kids—and if she hadn’t thrown in the reminder that she was eight months pregnant and needed all the moral support she could find.

He had been standing by one of the food tables on Jack Dugan’s vast, pine-shaded deck overlooking the Sound, munching on some kind of lobster thingy that barely made a mouthful and wondering when the hell he could finally leave, when he spotted her. The Grace Kelly look-alike in an ice-blue sweater, matching slacks, designer shoes and one row of discreetly elegant pearls that made her look as if she’d just walked out of some exclusive photo shoot for Town & Country.

Just another bubbleheaded, self-involved socialite, he figured. Still, something about her intrigued him. Rear Window had always been one of his favorite movies.

He watched her from the other side of the huge deck for a long time: the furrow of her forehead as she concentrated on what the elderly matron in the garish purple suit was saying; the way she tucked her smooth blond hair behind her ear with slender fingers; the soft smile that captured her mouth at something the older woman said.

After a moment he watched her excuse herself and wander to an empty spot on the deck facing the water. She stood there for a long time, gazing out at the Sound. She looked lonely. Isolated, removed from the crowd, just as he felt. Unable to help himself, he finally began to move purposefully through the milling people toward her.

When he reached her side, he had murmured something inane about the sunset, just as an opener. He didn’t even remember what, but he knew she had to have heard him. She froze but didn’t respond at all and an instant later she turned abruptly and walked away from him, leaving him astonished and uncomfortably aware that his face was burning.

He’d never considered himself a particularly vain man but he sure as hell wasn’t used to women completely ignoring him. As brush-offs went, this one had been particularly brutal.

It still stung, he had to admit. Two months later.

He didn’t want to help her. He wanted to tell her to take a dive right into the Sound. But she had Grace on her side. What the hell else was he supposed to do? After a moment, Beau blew out a breath. The only way he was going to get rid of her was to humor her.

“Look, Ms. Quinn, I’ll check out the file. I don’t think I’ll see anything there that Speth and Watson missed, but I’ll take a look. That’s all I can do.”

As Elizabeth registered his words, she felt as if a weight the size of the Cascades had just been hefted from her shoulder.

He was going to help her find who killed Tina! She wasn’t going to have to do this alone.

Ohthankyouthankyouthankyou. The words jumbled up in her head, in her throat, shoving together like boxcars on a derailed train. She froze for an instant, painfully aware he was watching her, expecting some response. Slow down. Think. With fierce concentration, she managed to sort the words out, after what she hoped wasn’t too awkward a pause.

Thank. You. Thank you.

She murmured the words, then rose. She had to get out of here. Soon. She could feel her composure begin to crack apart like fragile antique glass. If she wanted to get through this meeting without it completely shattering, she was going to have to wrap things up quickly.

Coming here, facing Beau Riley, had taken every ounce of strength she possessed. More. Her insides were shaky, hollow, and her head pounded from trying so hard to concentrate.

She didn’t do at all well with strangers or with confrontations. But she had to remember Alex. This was all for him. She couldn’t let that sweet child grow up with one more strike against him, the stigma and pain of believing his mother had committed suicide. As she well knew, he would have enough to deal with throughout his life. He didn’t need this, too.

Tina did not kill herself. Elizabeth knew it better than she knew the blasted alphabet.

If she had to face a thousand gorgeous police detectives to prove it, she would do it for Alex.

She wasn’t sure exactly how, but by some miracle she managed to say goodbye and to hold the fraying edges of herself together until she could escape from the dark-eyed, intense Beau Riley.

Somehow she made it out of the precinct and through the echoing parking garage to her car. She unlocked the door and slid inside, then sagged against the leather, wanting nothing but to stay right there in a boneless, quivering heap.

Beau Riley. She pressed a hand to her stomach, finally admitting that not all of the fluttering there stemmed from stress and nerves. An unmistakable sizzle of awareness was there, too, along with a huge dose of mortification.

She should have known. Beau Riley, the detective Grace swore would help her, was the same man she had encountered at the Dugans’ party a few months earlier.

Beau Riley was the man she had treated with such abominable rudeness, only because every single word in her head had vanished when he approached her, looking male and gorgeous and terrifying.

Rather than stand in front of him gaping like an idiot, she had chosen escape.

Did he remember her? Of course he would. Not many men could forget a major-league rejection like that. For one fleeting moment she wished she could rush back into the police station and explain why she had turned her back on him. If only she could assure him her behavior had nothing to do with him, but with her.

She couldn’t, of course. Even if she managed to find the right words, she could never explain to someone as self-possessed as Beau Riley how stupid and awkward she was. She could never tell him that no matter how hard she tried, she didn’t understand every word he said to her.

How could she blurt out to a stranger that the wiring inside her head sometimes decided to go haywire and when it did, she couldn’t even find a simple word like hello?

She blew out a breath. He must think she was the rudest person on the planet. The ice princess. She knew people called her that. It was a far better label than the ones she’d heard as a child.

Freak.

Moron.

Stupid.

She would take ice princess any day. The hand still pressed to her stomach clenched into a fist. She would just have to let him go on believing her cold. If he was willing to help her find who killed Tina, she didn’t care what he thought of her.

She closed her eyes but his image still burned in her mind, as it had far more often than she cared to admit since the night of the fund-raiser, until Tina’s violent death three weeks ago had pushed away anything as frivolous as thoughts of a gorgeous man.

Tina would have called him a major hottie. Elizabeth managed a smile even as grief pierced her again whenever she thought of her friend.

He was very different from the polished, smooth executives her father had paraded home in the months before his death a year ago, eternally hopeful that one of them would take his dimwitted daughter off his hands.

Beau Riley had little in common with those tame, docile men like her one-time fiancé, men who cared more about their manicures than about things like truth and justice. She knew it instinctively.

The bleat of her cell phone shattered the quiet inside the Lexus before she could dwell more on the detective.

She gazed at the phone as it rang a second time, tempted to ignore it. Talking on the phone was always a challenge when she couldn’t use body language and facial expressions as cues.

One look at the incoming number told her she had no choice but to pick it up. Luisa never called unless it was important.

“Hello?”

Silence answered her for a moment, then Luisa’s melodious, soothing voice reached her. “Mi hija? I worry for you.”

Elizabeth didn’t need to see the older woman’s sweet, plump face to comprehend the concern and love in her voice. Some of the tension in her shoulders began to seep out. “I’m fine. I’ll be heading for the…” Big. Water. Float. She could see the blasted thing in her mind but the slippery word evaded her.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally said.

Ferry! That’s what she meant. The ferry. She almost blurted it out but she knew Luisa had enough experience with her conversational idiosyncrasies after all these years that the occasional lurch didn’t faze her at all.

“How is Alex?” Elizabeth asked instead.

“Taking a nap,” his grandmother answered. “Did you talk to the policia?”

“Grace’s friend agreed to look at the file. I think he will help me.”

The other woman didn’t answer and Elizabeth swallowed her sigh. Luisa wasn’t convinced that her daughter had been murdered. She wanted Elizabeth to let the whole thing drop, to allow the police ruling to stand. As painful as it was to think her daughter had ended her own life, Elizabeth suspected Luisa feared digging too deeply into Tina’s wild, troubled world.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally repeated. “Give Alex a kiss for me when he wakes up and tell him I’ll take him down later to watch the…” Swim. Quack. This time she forced herself to concentrate until the word came to her. “To watch the ducks.”

She hung up the phone and stared out the windshield at the dim, unnatural light inside the garage. Despite Luisa’s reservations, Elizabeth knew she was doing the right thing by pursuing this investigation, no matter how difficult she might find it.

For Alex and for Luisa.

And for Tina, who had never called her stupid.

An hour after Elizabeth Quinn walked out of the precinct, Beau could swear her subtle perfume like just-ripe peaches still lingered in the air, sweet and fresh and oddly innocent.

Like her.

He frowned. Now why the hell would such a thought enter his head? He didn’t know about the innocent part but he knew for sure she wasn’t sweet. She was cold and snobby. The ice princess, who didn’t have the time of day for a cop unless she wanted something from him.

Somehow the nickname didn’t jibe with the quiet, solemn woman who had faced him with trembling hands and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

There was more to Elizabeth Quinn than her reputation. He had a feeling she was far more complex than the facts of the case she had asked him to look into.

With a sigh he turned back to the file. What did she expect him to find that the other detectives couldn’t? The file told a grim story of a troubled woman who had hit rock bottom.

Tina Hidalgo, age twenty-eight, had been found by a nosy neighbor peeking through open blinds. She was dead of a gunshot wound. The Glock with only her fingerprints on it—the Glock she had purchased illegally the day before she died—was on the floor, underneath her dangling fingers. The medical examiner said the bullet entry and exit were consistent with a self-inflicted injury.

She had powder burns on her hand.

And she had left a note, short and succinct.

I’m sorry.

He looked at the copy of the note included in the file. Her girlish handwriting with its big loops and rounded letters looked shaky, but that was only to be expected by someone under severe emotional strain. It definitely matched other samples of her writing, also included in the file.

Elizabeth Quinn had left out a few interesting little tidbits during their meeting. Like Tina Hidalgo’s drug problem. The night of her death, she had enough heroin in her system to launch the space shuttle.

Elizabeth had also neglected to tell him her friend had been fired the week before from her sometime-job as a stripper for frequent absences from work—and even more damning, this wasn’t her first suicide attempt. Seven years earlier, she’d had her stomach pumped after swallowing a bottle of painkillers.

It was a clean case. Speth and Watson hadn’t missed anything. He set his pen down and rubbed at the ache between his eyes he always got when he read too much.

He wasn’t going to enjoy telling Elizabeth Quinn his conclusions. He could just picture that devastated grief in her pretty blue eyes again.